Category Archives: Writing

A few weeks ago, I saw the following question: “ Is The Band’s The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down now part of The Forbidden Music canon? “. To which I instinctively replied: “Absolutely not!” I was a little indignant that the question had even been asked, but on reflection, I realised that it was the reaction of a writer; an artist’s instinctive defence of art. And I wondered.

First of all, let me say that I understand the instinct to quietly shun the music of those convicted of vile offences, lest one be thought to be defending the artist. That is not as clear-cut an argument as you might think, of course - those who would defend Wagner for his anti-semitism tend to point to the music as a creation apart from its creator; we might not have wanted to take tea with the man, but we cannot deny the quality of his work - can we say the same for Rolf Harris? I honestly don’t know the answer to that - how do we react to Two Little Boys, which Harris covered, or Tie Me Kanagroo Down, Sport, which he wrote? Do our reactions to those differ? What about the original of the former, or a cover of the latter? Do our reactions depend on the association with a man jailed for predatory sexual offences?

All of which has little or nothing to do with The Band, who stand accused of nothing more than writing and performing a song which is associated with the Confederate forces in the US Civil War. I’m choosing my words carefully, here - ‘associated with’ is as far as I’m prepared to go, and I believe that goes to the heart of the question.

You can read the lyrics a hundred times, and still not be clear exactly who Virgil Caine was, or what he stood for - he is at once a symbol of the defeated South, a spokesman of the forgotten infantry of every war, and an ordinary man mourning the loss of a brother; he is every soldier who fought on a losing side and every survivor of war who looks around him wondering if there can be a cause worth paying this price.

And he is all these things because of the way he was written. This is the beauty of fiction; it’s up to the reader - the listener in this case - to interpret Virgil Caine, to put our own frame around the picture. Is Virgil Caine a standard bearer for the Rebel cause, as he says his brother was, or was he an unwitting pawn in a game he had no interest in? He is, of course, both of these things, or neither, depending, partly, on the mindset you bring to the song - in one sense, if the song seems to you to be defiantly mourning the lost Confederate cause, you’ll see him one way; if it feels like a lament for the loss of innocence of a child soldier, the historical context will hardly matter.

For myself, I think the song presents us with an uncomfortable picture: just how different were the soldiers on either side? Did many of them believe passionately in the causes they were fighting for, or were they caught up in the supposed romance of battle? Were Union soldiers fighting to end slavery? Were the Confederate troops they faced fighting to retain it, or were they rallying behind a flag because their friends and neighbours were? The song doesn’t try to answer those questions; it leaves you to draw your own conclusions.

And, in the end, I think that’s what art is supposed to do. You might not care to see conflict through the eyes of the defeated, particularly if you consider their cause indefensible, but I don’t believe that we should censor those views; I think it is the purpose of art to make us look at uncomfortable things and understand our reaction to them, and there are vanishingly few songs in the canon which do that.

Ultimately, I do not believe that The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down celebrates anything; I believe it mourns senseless slaughter, and reminds us that those who fought for a cause we still find abhorrent 150 years later were people not demons. I believe it fulfils the promise of good art, to make the audience think. However, I also believe that there are those who will read it as a rallying cry for causes which should have been lost long ago, but we cannot start censoring art because it can be misused, any more than I can force everyone to read the lyrics the way I do. What we can do is to continue to have these conversations honestly and openly, and to understand that a song written in the wake of the great victories of the civil rights movement can easily have its meaning blurred by the political climate of the next generation.

If you know me at all, you know about the books. If you’ve ever seen my office – especially the new office – you’ll have noticed that there are books. A lot of books. Books I’ve read, re-read and loved; books I’ve read once; books I’ve yet to read, even books I read and didn’t enjoy – those ones are on the shelves because not only is it sinful to dispose of a book, even if it’s in a good cause, but also because one day I may decide that my inability
to enjoy the book was my fault, not the book’s, and try again.

Books furnish a room almost as much as they furnish the mind, and so I have a lot of books. It follows, you won’t be surprised to learn, that I spend time in bookshops –bookstores, I have to call them now, although I flit between the two almost at random, no doubt to the bafflement of my Canadian friends who wonder why I need to take my books in to be repaired.

Bookstores and I go back a long way. I cannot remember a time when I didn’t know
where my nearest one was, and I definitely cannot remember a time when I could walk past the door of one on the way to somewhere else without a yearning to pause, peer in and – go on, just a minute or two, it can’t hurt – cross the threshold and be lost for a while. I can – and this has happened – spend entire days just visiting bookstores; indeed, back in the UK this summer, I drove at least a hundred miles out of my way just so I could go back to Hay-on-Wye, which is almost entirely made of bookstores.

You see how it is?

Different stores require different approaches; an old favourite second-hand store rewards careful scrutiny; head to where I know the good stuff is, then work my way round, being careful not to miss anything important on the way. Stores I haven’t been in before get sized up on entry – I can tell what kind of place it is within a minute or so of opening the door; I won’t give away all my secrets, but the number and location of orange Penguin spines is part of the assessment – and I either linger or move on in search of the next delight.

New bookstores require a different approach; in these, I will generally linger by the shiny new releases before going any further. Something will catch my eye, and I’ll read the blurb and sample the prose before moving on. At this point, one of two things will happen: I’ll be distracted by something else shinier nearby (the internal monologue goes something like “Ooh! I didn’t know he/she had a new book out”) or I’ll be set off on a path of discovery by something I just read.

The path of discovery will take me to all parts of the store, but in no particular order. Something about the way the first book is written, or the subject matter, or the name of a character, will lead me to look for something else entirely, and while hunting for that, I’ll be reminded that I read about another book a month ago which I meant to look up, and so on it goes. Entire afternoons can easily be lost this way, and large amounts of money can be inadvertently spent while I’m about it.

However, new book stores – particularly the chain stores, but, sadly, this also applies to some indies, and the rare second-hand store – often contain a device which will have me scurrying from the store in no time.

It’s called the staff.

Not you, of course, should you happen to work in a bookstore. Not you at all. It’s a particular kind of staff in a particular kind of store, and it’s not their fault, of course; they are only doing as they are told.

Some years ago, I encountered (sadly only in print; he was semi-mythical, and – come to think of it – may have been the invention of Iain Sinclair) a delightful fellow who went, for reasons which were never made clear, by the name drif field (sic). drif was a second-hand book dealer, and cataloguer of bookstores. He was, to put it mildly, idiosyncratic, but he knew what he was talking about. I have his guides to the second-hand bookstores of Britain on my shelves to this day (fat lot of use they are to me here in Canada, but the are works of art. They are also books, of course, and as such May Never Be Disposed Of).

The guides are wonderful, eccentric and very true. drif encountered pretty much every type of bookstore staff (he may, in fact, have met everyone who ever worked in one of
these stores), and he had an acronym for each of them. My favourite was the delightful F.A.R.T.S.

If a store was tainted with F.A.R.T.S., I knew at once it was not my kind of store, and was to be avoided, for I have a problem with this behaviour, and I think I know why.

If you were to film me as I wandered from bookstore to bookstore, the pattern would be similar in each; allow at least an hour for general browsing, plus decision-making time and ‘chatting with the staff as I try to justify to myself why I’m spending so much money on books’ time; the pattern will repeat wherever I am. Unless, of course, I am confronted by a member of staff. Then things change dramatically. There are two kinds of staff interaction in-store which will drive me away – F.A.R.T.S. and the generic and aggravating ‘Are you finding everything OK?’ interaction – I genuinely don’t know how to answer that question without seeming curmudgeonly, because it is only ever asked while I am reading the blurb on a book, or checking the index of a non-fiction title for references which will make me want to buy it; in either case, I am busy; I am book-shopping, and I do not wish to be disturbed.

Book-shopping is a serious business, not to be interrupted lightly, and I am certain that, if you were filming my every bookstore interaction, you would notice that the time I spend in store after I am interrupted can be measured in seconds rather than minutes.

Extreme, I know, but there it is – you broke the spell; you interrupted my serious business, and now I’m going to take my custom elsewhere. Sorry about that.

Oh, and F.A.R.T.S.?

Follows Around Recommending The Stock. Don’t do that. Just don’t.

And, yes, once I was thinking about it, I reckon I know why. I remember being about 14, and not at school having had the flu or some such – I was not a sickly child; this may have been one of the few times I genuinely was unwell, but by the time I decided, bored, to take the bus into town to go book shopping, I was probably well enough to go back to school.

Malingering, it’s called.

Anyway, there I was, minding my own business, browsing in that shop on the Upperkirkgate in Aberdeen which I can so nearly remember the name of when a member of staff – no doubt a parent, and with a keen eye for the truant – took it upon herself to interrogate me as to my reasons for not being in school. She interrupted my Serious Business, and made me feel awkward and aware that I did, in fact, have no excuse not to be in Double German right that minute.

I scurried from the shop and got back on the bus, scarred, as it turns out, for life.

So, it’s me, not you, bookstore staff. But please; I know that it says in the manual that you have to ‘engage with your customers’ – I understand you’re just doing your job. All I ask is that you look at it from my point of view; I’m in my sanctuary, the one place I count on to let my mind wander and explore; the place where I feel most at home among the insanity of the modern ‘retail experience’. If I look like I’m concentrating, it’s because I’m concentrating. If you can’t catch my eye, then pass on by.

And if you arrive behind me in your comfortable, rubber-soled shoes and I don’t know you’re there, ‘Are you finding everything OK?’ will cause me to drop the book I’m reading on my foot.

It didn’t feel right just to start back up after so long, so I’m acknowledging that I haven’t posted anything in here for months. Then I’m going to write something. Just, you know, to check I still can.

Edit: I started something, I really did. Then something happened, possibly related to the fact that I can’t use the backspace button in Chrome properly any more, because that is, apparently, an improvement, and what I had written (which was going to need an edit, but broadly, I rather liked) was no more.

I’m slightly miffed, but it’s not going to put me off. Just going to go about this a different way.

A little while ago, I was unsure about the wisdom of starting on the next book when this one isn’t finished yet.

(It’s getting there, I promise)

Well, now I’m also writing two books ahead. This is a Good Thing, I have decided, because:

a) I’ve never done that before, it should be interesting

b) I can get stuck in one place or another without it mattering too much, I’ll just go and work on the next one

c) I’m getting more actual writing done. I seem to remember that it’s the actual writing down of things which I enjoy rather than the ‘waiting for feedback’ or ‘damn, the first 13 pages are going to have to go’ parts which aren’t quite as much fun.

d) I have a feeling that time will at more of a premium in the next year than it has been this summer, when I got next to no writing done. I think that I should probably have some strategies in place to tackle that problem. This might be one of them.

… but this scene popped into my head fully-formed as I was taking the boys to school this morning. It would appear that I’ve started on the third book before the second one’s finished. I imagine this is a good thing, but I’m not certain. Anyway, this is what ‘A Little Bird Told Me’ looks like right now:

“So, would I have heard of you?”

I stare at her. I still know nothing about her aside from her name. She’s, what? Mid-thirties? Maybe older, I don’t know. I’ve never been good at ages. I shrug.

“I doubt it. We made three albums, back when that was still a thing, and we had one ‘hit’” – I actually do the thing with the waving fingers – “in the UK in 1983. So, no – probably not.”

“In the Ukraine?”

“UK. Britain. England.”

She smiles.

“Yeah, nobody calls it that. I think we know where England is, but UK? Nope.”

“It’s not England, but – you know what? Fine.”

I drain the cup. Fourth, fifth of the day? Jetlag and coffee; always such an interesting mix. I’m ready to close up, but she isn’t.

“Tell me more. What were you called? How famous are you really? Are we going to have groupies tracking you down?”

I want to laugh, but isn’t this the whole point? No-one knows where I am.

“No groupies. There never were many; we weren’t that kind of band.”

“What kind of band were you, then?”

“The kind which doesn’t attract groupies. Or women, much. The spotty teenage boy market, as far as I could see. Lengthy, technical songs with earnest lyrics about making the world a better place. Just at the point when everyone was making short, simple songs about cars and girls. We even wrote songs about that.”

“Could I look you up online? What would I find?”

She actually has her phone out now. I frown. Didn’t we have the conversation about how bad the internet access is out here?

“I just text my nephew and he does it. Come on, what were you called?”

I hate this part.

“We’re not there. There’s almost nothing, no Wikipedia, no online discography, nothing. We sold a few thousand albums and no-one remembers us, and that’s fine by me.”

She’s literally drumming her fingers on the countertop now.

“Fine. We were called The Undercrawlers.”

“Yeesh.”

I know. I always knew. We were called The Undercrawlers because none of us liked the name. Mark wanted to be Viking, or at a push, The Vikings. Fin wanted to be Tom Bombadil or something. I thought Us would work, but the other two laughed. We sat in Fin’s back room – he was the only one from a family well-to-do enough to have a second room on the ground floor for entertaining guests, and it was where the piano was – and argued for days, it seemed. I don’t remember who suggested it, but we all agreed it was horrible. So, of course, that was the name we chose.

We weren’t very bright, really.

After a flurry of typing, she’s back.

“You’re right. He says there are only a couple of mentions – a song called” – she peers at the screen, squinting slightly, and I mentally revise her age upwards a touch – “‘Nobody Loves You’ – no wonder nobody bought your records – and something about a lawsuit.”

That sounds about right. If anyone now knows anything about The Undercrawlers, it’s that we were the band who were sued out of existence by our own record company. It’s a long story.

“It’s a long story. And really not very interesting. Isn’t it time to close up yet? I’m a little tired.”

She grins.

“You go; I’ll finish up. I can show you how tomorrow. Have a good sleep, Mr. Rock Star.

I grunt. I never was a Rock Star. I definitely thought I wanted to be once upon a time though.

I spend most of that night staring at the ceiling thinking of what happened to Fin, and why it might have been my fault.

Two solid days of work purely on structure, and I have a radically different story from the one I thought I was telling. The really good part is that several times as I was reshaping everything and slotting the parts together, I actually said out loud “Aha!” I actually have been surprising myself with how well the foreshadowing and the red herrings are going to work.

There’s still a lot to figure out - including making the key plot element believable without giving away the secret at the heart of it - but that’s what the second draft is for.

Oh, and if Larry Brooks is reading this (you never know); I have a concept, I have a premise and I have a theme. It’s already ten times the story it used to be!

(I know, I'm probably the four hundredth person to use that as a title for a blog post. It's early in the morning.)

One of the most encouraging responses I have had about Going Back related to the sex in it. To get a positive reaction to a scene I had agonised over was a relief, and perhaps will allow me to write sex scenes in future without looking over my shoulder, wondering if those prigs from the Bad Sex Awards are waiting to pounce.

For it must be Bad Sex Awards time again; I have seen several references to brie in my Twitter feed in the last 24 hours. Encouragingly, however, I have also read one response which suggests that there may, at last, be some kind of backlash starting. If there is to be a popular revolt against this oddly British prudishness, count me in. I have read extracts from this years nominees (warning; extracts do contain, you know, rude words and that) and I have drawn two conclusions: firstly, there are at least two books on that list which I had not previously heard of which I now will buy and read, because the prose is enticing and I want to know more; secondly, that I had no idea there was a novel by Woody Guthrie out there, and even if it is as rough and ready as that excerpt suggests, I'd like to read it.

Which, of course, slightly undermines my position, since the existence of the literary world's most Victorian prize has actually publicised and sold books to me. Nevertheless, I shall remain steadfast in my opposition to it, because it is a Bad Thing.

Why? Well, for all the reasons Laurie Penny gives in that New Statesman article I linked to up there, but also, and fundamentally for me, it is because it judges bleeding chunks of text ripped from the still-warm bodies of their context by people with such a tin ear for language that I wonder if they had read the whole book in question at all. For example, in 2004, Tom Wolfe won for a passage from 'I Am Charlotte Simmons'. The winning paragraphs are unerotic, deeply unsettling and can cause actual queasiness in the unwary. Which is exactly the effect Wolfe was aiming at - the sex he depicts is meant to engender revulsion in the reader, and it is related in the voice of Charlotte; in exactly the same voice she uses to narrate the rest of the book. If you've read the whole thing, you might not like it, but you can't possibly call Charlotte's gruesome deflowering 'redundant' or 'egregious'' or any of those other words the Literary Review likes to spray around.

Leave the descriptions and depictions of sex in context, and the winners of any Bad Sex award should only go to those writers who, perhaps made nervous by the mere existence of the award, leave their poor reader unsure if their characters have slept together or merely held hands on a clifftop while waves pounded the rocks below as the 8.15 from Penzance disappeared into a tunnel behind them.

Which is not to say that we should be witness to every twitch and thrust of every character in fiction. The guiding principle remains "What do I lose if I replace this intimate description of glistening limbs and heaving bosoms with the words 'they had sex'?" If the answer is "not much", then leave it out. There are three sex scenes in Going Back - one is essential to the plot; the reader needs to know not only that it happened, but exactly what happened and how; the second takes place more or less off-screen, we are only privy to the aftermath, and the third, lovingly described in detail I instantly regretted, now takes place after the novel is finished; it didn't need to be there, so it now only exists in a file on my hard drive, and there it will stay, thank you very much. Had I left it in, I would probably have been eligible for a Bad Sex Award, and I'd have deserved it.

But passages like that don't win Bad Sex Awards; passages which cause uptight judges to blush or involve soft French cheese win awards. Passages which make perfect sense in the context of the whole novel win awards. The best and only way to respond to this priggishness is to go out and buy many copies of the winning book. We shall not be shamed by those who'd rather we closed the bedroom door and stayed on the outside. And if you need to see my characters having sex, see it you shall.

Overall, things are going well - the book is out there, well publicised, there are a number of positive reviews and just this morning I had a call from Books and Company asking me to restock them, because they had sold out.

But I've been thinking, and most of my thinking has been driven by my new favourite TED talk and a conversation I had with Conor late last night. First, the talk:

It's called The Art of Asking, and while it relates most strongly to music, I think it has a relevance for other arts as well. I haven't been able to shake its message off since I first saw it, because it is a powerful one. Powerful, and hard for us shy, retiring creative types to accept. I think, for me, it boils down to this - I know I have written something worthwhile. I know this because complete strangers have told me so. Now it's time to take a deep breath and ask people to pay money for it.

I believe Going Back is reasonably priced; I know it's good value for that price. If I could (and someone's going to show me how, I'm sure), I'd even take the plunge and ask people to pay me what they thought it was worth - maybe that's the next step along this road...

I showed the video to Conor late last night - we have an ongoing conversation about TED talks going on this summer - and we talked about how this new way of doing things will seem normal to him; it's just the world he grew up in, where artists can reach out to their public and ask them for feedback, ask them for inspiration, and ask them for help. And, of course, as we were talking, it occurred to me that it's not really new at all - it's the way things were always done until the corporations got involved. Well, the days of the corporations coming between the artist and their audience are numbered, and I for one think that's a good thing.

So here's my question: I know I have an audience out there in blog-, Facebook-, Twitter-land. Won't you buy my book? It's a small investment for hours of entertainment, and if you like it (or even if you don't), you can tell me all about it. And I'll talk back to you. And if we do that; have that conversation, the next book will be better. It's not that I think I can get rich doing this - I can't. But we can have an exchange which will result in you getting something you'll like, and I will be inspired - and able - to make more.

Well, it feels like most other days, to be fair. But, yes, things are happening - I have a few sales now on almost all of the currently available distribution channels, and a green light from Smashwords, meaning that the rest should follow in their own sweet time, some quicker than others. I've been quite good at keeping away from the various dashboards and so on - I know I'm not going to be selling hundreds of copies every day, so there's no point in obsessively refreshing the page every few hours. Mainly I need to keep busy with all the other things I should be doing. There's the mystery of how to get Shelfari working properly, for example - it seems to treat the Kindle and paperback versions as two completely separate objects, written by two different people, only one of whom is me. This needs more head-scratching.

And reviews. Reviews are the key to this whole enterprise, I'm told. And it's no good soliciting them from people who share my last name or IP address - that's kind of obvious. So, there is much behind-the-scenes work going on to deliver my book to people who will not only read it, but give it an honest review. That takes time, though - you have to let them read it, and then formulate a review.

I pressed the button marked 'Publish', and suddenly Going Back is a real thing, available in electronic bookstores all over the world (including Japan, but not Australia as yet. I know there's an Australian option out there; that's next on the list)

The temptation to sit back and wait while the royalties roll in is quite strong, but I know that this is just the start of the hard work...